Students of the late historian and UC Berkeley professor Ronald Takaki remember him as a stickler for "critical thinking" -- constantly asking them to reconsider conventional wisdom from multiple perspectives, to treat no cow as sacred and no set of foundations as fixed.

That urge to question made Takaki one of the most penetrating voices in the movement to demand a full and fair telling of our nation's history, replacing what he referred to as the "Master Narrative" with a version incorporating the multiple, interwoven threads of our American experience -- white, black, Latino, Native, and of course, Asian.

Given that Takaki took his leave of this world in the waning days of May -- our federally reserved slot for celebrating Asian American heritage -- it seems like a good time to think critically about a concept that Takaki himself had an outsized role in developing: The idea of Asian America itself.

In the Beginning

It's easy to forget that the term "Asian American" is a young one -- just a hair over 40 years old, with its first recorded public usage occurring, not coincidentally, at UC Berkeley, the gravitational center of Sixties student activism.

"Back then, I remember going up to [New York] City College when some friends called me and said, 'We're shutting this joint down until they agree to have an Asian-American Studies department,'" says comic artist Larry Hama, reminiscing about his days as a student activist. "I think my first reaction was, 'What the heck is 'Asian-American Studies'?' But I went anyway, and ended up manning the barricades. I saw faces I recognized from Japanese school, from the judo club, and Chinese and Korean kids I went to high school with. It opened up a whole new world for me, as somebody who'd been the only Asian kid in my whole elementary school in Queens. And it led to my getting involved in the movement."

In those early days, being "Asian American" was an act of passion, a statement of purpose. The lack of history and definition around the term were a source of freedom, not concern, offering a chance to build a brand new way to be American, in a brand new America.

Participants in the Asian American movement grabbed that opportunity and ran with it. The following year, in January 1969, Berkeley students organized an event intended to begin the process of constructing an Asian American identity: The "American Yellow Identity Symposium."

A leading speaker at that conference was a young professor who'd gotten his Ph.D. in history from Cal and then went to UCLA to teach its first-ever Black Studies course. His name was Ron Takaki, and his articulate affirmation of pan-Asian common cause is still remembered by symposium attendees as decisive in shaping their belief in the importance of a shared Asian American identity.

Identification, Please

Four decades later, however, it's worth considering how far the idea of Asian America has come, and how far it can go. Does Asian American identity still have meaning? Have prevailing attitudes towards race evolved to a point where the term "Asian American" limits us rather than lifting us up? Has the moment passed?

Truth be told, the current picture isn't pretty. Many prominent Asian American institutions, particularly those associated with arts, culture and media, have either shut down or are in danger of doing so. Some of this is due to the larger economic crisis, but if pressed, many of the former leaders of these organizations will quietly admit that the core issue they face is simple: Audiences and subscribers for their work have been dwindling, and without collective support from within the community, it's been an uphill battle getting support from outside of it.

And those issues are rare these days. It's hard to point to a critical political event that has galvanized pan-Asian communities since 1982, the fight for justice for Vincent Chin, the Chinese American murdered by laid-off Detroit autoworkers for being "Japanese." (Some might suggest the protests against the Broadway musical "Miss Saigon" fit that bill. Even so, those took place in 1991 -- nearly two decades ago.)

All of these factors point to the uncomfortable truth that bringing together Asian Americans has often seemed like herding cats, if those cats were randomly mixed in with, say, dogs, sheep and giraffes -- a metaphor that reflects the staggering diversity of our community, which incorporates dozens of nationalities, each with multiple linguistic, religious and ethnic subsets, and a varying historical record of immigration to the U.S.

Yes, the challenges are enormous. And yet, the stakes are high. Those who seek to suppress racial discourse have gravitated toward Asian Americans as the weakest link in the multicultural chain. They suggest that the successes some Asian Americans have achieved mean we no longer need the protection of a racial category; they point to the difficulties we've faced in organizing as evidence the category never should have existed in the first place.

The unspoken belief of these critics seems to be that Asian America is a genie, which, if crammed back into the bottle, will cause the entire architecture of race in this nation to vanish like a retracted wish.

The Future, Pre-Release

What's so wrong with that goal, after all? Isn't a race-free society ultimately preferable? The great Patricia J. Williams, in her essay collection "Seeing a Color-Blind Future," writes on the fallacy of thinking that willfully ignoring racial difference solves the racial problem. She argues that simply calling time-out on race merely freezes the status quo in place, with all of its residual injustices and imbalances. Fix those first -- then we'll talk.

But as the nature of race evolves, such fixes have gotten harder. Racial definitions have been complicated by mixed families, multiracial heritage, the rise of Third Culture kids and the increasingly fluid mobility of populations. (No better symbol of the convolution of racial identity exists, of course, than our nation's president, the son of a Kenyan immigrant and a white woman from Kansas, born in Hawaii, raised partly in Indonesia, and proudly bearing a name that earmarks his "exotic" origins in every syllable: Barack Hussein Obama.)

Meanwhile, globalization has put the spotlight on ethnic conflicts between groups of people that most Americans find indistinguishable: The war in Darfur, the Rwandan genocide, the massacre of Kurds in Iraq. We're in an era in which understanding the subtle and ambiguous nature of difference is more critical, and more difficult, than ever.

Which is why, far from being the end of days for Asian American identity, this should be just the beginning. No community has been more impacted by multiracialism, transnationalism and panculturalism, the forces that are reshaping racial discourse. In essence, we represent something of a beta test for the future. If we can find common passion and shared purpose despite the issues we face, well, there's hope for global society yet. On that note, I'll let Professor Takaki have the final word, in this quote from a 2001 WashingtonPost.com interview:

"Our expanding ethnic diversity of this century, a time when we will all be minorities, offers us an invitation to create a larger memory of who we are as Americans and to reaffirm our founding principle of equality. Let's put aside fears of the 'disuniting of America' and warnings of the 'clash of civilizations.' As Langston Hughes sang, 'Let America be America, where equality is in the air we breathe.'"

PopMail

If you've been a reader of Asian Pop for a while, you'll know that back in 2006, I wrote a column called "Look ...Up in the Sky! It's Asian Man!," which explored the reasons why the world of comics has so few high-profile Asian heroes. At the tail end of that piece, I wrote in a PopMail very much like this one: "After our formal interview finished, Keith Chow and I ended up talking for a while about wanting to someday put together an Asian American superhero anthology ... Who knows? Stranger things have happened!"

Strange things have, indeed, happened: "Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology," edited by Keith, myself, Parry Shen and Jerry Ma, is now in a bookstore near you. But that's not actually the reason I'm writing this post. The news I really want to share is that, just as the column led to the book, so did the book lead to something else equally cool: A group of "Secret Identities" contributors have organized the First Annual Asian American ComiCon (July 11, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.), to be held at its new Maya Lin-designed Museum of Chinese in America in New York City. If you can make it out to New York, come on down! Registration is limited; proceeds go to benefit the museum, a wonderful and worthy nonprofit cause. For more information, keep an eye on http://aacomicon.com.

One more announcement: The Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment are inviting Asian American film and videomakers to submit short screenplays to their 2009 "CAPE Digital Shorts Program," a Spike TV-sponsored competition. The winning director receives $5,000 to produce his or her short film, as well as the ongoing support and counsel of a veteran filmmaker mentor. It's a great way to get a foot in the Hollywood door -- so if you've got a script burning a hole in your hard drive, print it out and send it on in. Click here for more details.